Working Groups

Expertise

Nick Swanson-Hysell is an assistant professor in the Department Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley. His research is focused on integrating original geological field observations with laboratory datasets in order to further understanding of global change through time. Projects in his research group focus on developing data from sequences of volcanic and sedimentary rocks in order to understand the past positions of the continents, the evolution of Earth's magnetic field, and large changes in climate. This research is particularly focused on developing and compiling paleomagnetic data (preserved ancient magnetic directions in rocks) with the goal of using these data to constrain models of how the continents have moved through time. His contributions to this field have been recognized with the 2014 William Gilbert Award from the American Geophysical Union. Nick is passionate about furthering the culture of openly accessible data and publications as well as reproducible data analysis. The data and code associated with publications from his research group are openly available within Github repositories that are centered around Jupyter notebooks (http://www.swanson-hysell.org/publications/https://github.com/Swanson-Hysell-Group ). He is a developer for PmagPy (https://github.com/PmagPy ), an open source software project written in Python for paleomagnetic data analysis that, in addition to myriad functionality, enables preparation of datasets for an open community data archive. He is interested in training efforts for scientific computing and integrates data science tools, such as Jupyter notebooks, into his teaching at Berkeley.